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Category: Psychology

People depolarize after elections as their attachment to their preferred political party weakens

People depolarize after elections as their attachment to their preferred political party weakens

PsyPost reports: Affective polarization — one’s level of animosity towards political rivals – tends to decline in the wake of elections, according to new research that examined data from 42 countries. The study, published in the journal Electoral Studies, indicates that this depolarization is partially the result of citizens becoming less strongly attached to political parties over time. “Affective polarization is one of the main concerns for the health and quality of contemporary democracies. Some polarization may be beneficial for…

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Trump’s coronavirus response looks heroic to many white men

Trump’s coronavirus response looks heroic to many white men

Olga Khazan writes: Kurtis, a young accountant in McKinney, Texas, likes the thing that many people hate about Donald Trump: that the president has left the pandemic response almost entirely up to local officials. “He left it up to each state to make their own decision on how they wanted to proceed,” Kurtis told me recently. Most experts think the absence of a national strategy for tackling the coronavirus has been a disaster. But Kurtis argues that North Dakota, for…

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The value of uncertainty

The value of uncertainty

Mark Miller et al write: Understanding our own relationship with uncertainty has never been more important, for we live in unusually challenging times. Climate change, COVID-19 and the new order of surveillance capitalism make it feel as if we are entering a new age of global volatility. Where once for many in the West there were just pockets of instability (deep unpredictability) in a sea of reliability – albeit sometimes in disagreeable structures and expectations – it lately seems as…

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Politics is visceral

Politics is visceral

Manos Tsakiris writes: We live in bodies that feel increasingly unsafe. Pandemics, climate change, sexual assault, systemic racism, the pressures of gig-economy jobs, the crisis of liberal democracy – these phenomena create feelings of vulnerability that are, quite literally, visceral. They’re visceral in the sense that emotional experience arises from how our physiological organs – from our guts and lungs to our hearts and hormonal systems – respond to an everchanging world. They’re also political, in that our feelings affect…

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Humans aren’t inherently selfish – we’re actually hardwired to work together

Humans aren’t inherently selfish – we’re actually hardwired to work together

Franzi/Shutterstock By Steve Taylor, Leeds Beckett University There has long been a general assumption that human beings are essentially selfish. We’re apparently ruthless, with strong impulses to compete against each other for resources and to accumulate power and possessions. If we are kind to one another, it’s usually because we have ulterior motives. If we are good, it’s only because we have managed to control and transcend our innate selfishness and brutality. This bleak view of human nature is closely…

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Mitochondria may hold keys to anxiety and mental health

Mitochondria may hold keys to anxiety and mental health

Elizabeth Landau writes: Carmen Sandi recalls the skepticism she faced at first. A behavioral neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, she had followed a hunch that something going on inside critical neural circuits could explain anxious behavior, something beyond brain cells and the synaptic connections between them. The experiments she began in 2013 showed that neurons involved in anxiety-related behaviors showed abnormalities: Their mitochondria, the organelles often described as cellular power plants, didn’t work well —…

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Love is medicine for fear

Love is medicine for fear

Arthur C. Brooks writes: We are living in a time of fear. The coronavirus pandemic has threatened our lives, health, and economy in ways most Americans have never experienced. We have no idea what the future will bring. According to the American Psychological Association’s annual “Stress in America” survey, the percentage of people in the U.S. who say that “the future of our nation is a significant source of stress” rose to 83 percent in June 2020, up from 63…

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Coronavirus responses highlight how humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

Coronavirus responses highlight how humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

The more politicized an issue, the harder it is for people to absorb contradictory evidence. Drew Angerer/Getty Images News via Getty Images By Adrian Bardon, Wake Forest University Bemoaning uneven individual and state compliance with public health recommendations, top U.S. COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci recently blamed the country’s ineffective pandemic response on an American “anti-science bias.” He called this bias “inconceivable,” because “science is truth.” Fauci compared those discounting the importance of masks and social distancing to “anti-vaxxers” in their…

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The role of cognitive dissonance in the pandemic

The role of cognitive dissonance in the pandemic

Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris write: Members of Heaven’s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth in 1997, a spaceship would be traveling in its wake—ready to take true believers aboard. Several members of the group bought an expensive, high-powered telescope so that they might get a clearer view of the comet. They quickly brought it back and asked for a refund. When the manager asked why, they complained that the telescope was defective,…

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Lethargic global response to COVID-19: How the human brain’s failure to assess abstract threats cost us dearly

Lethargic global response to COVID-19: How the human brain’s failure to assess abstract threats cost us dearly

The Trump administration was not alone with its slow response to the COVID-19 crisis. Getty Images / White House Pool By Arash Javanbakht, Wayne State University and Cristian Capotescu, University of Michigan More U.S. citizens have confirmed COVID-19 infections than the next five most affected countries combined. Yet as recently as mid-March, President Trump downplayed the gravity of the crisis by falsely claiming the coronavirus was nothing more than seasonal flu, or a Chinese hoax, or a deep state plot…

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Do people become more selfless as they age?

Do people become more selfless as they age?

The main characters of ‘The Good Place’ become better over time. Michael Tran/FilmMagic via Getty Images By Ulrich Mayr, University of Oregon Looking for something to binge-watch while you’re hunkering down at home? Consider checking out the popular TV show “The Good Place.” Over four recently concluded seasons, the series follows the adventures and mishaps of four utterly self-centered characters on their quest to become decent and selfless human beings. The deeper question this philosophy-laced comedy raises is: Can people…

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In battling the coronavirus, will ‘optimistic bias’ be our undoing?

In battling the coronavirus, will ‘optimistic bias’ be our undoing?

Unless danger is flashing before us, we view risks through rose-colored glasses. slavemotion/iStock via Getty Images By Marie Helweg-Larsen, Dickinson College As the coronavirus has fanned across the globe, some people have been more complacent about the risk of contracting the virus than others. On March 21, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was apoplectic after photographs emerged of New Yorkers congregating in parks, apparently ignoring mandates for social distancing. “It’s insensitive, it’s arrogant, it’s self-destructive, it’s disrespectful and it has…

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Coronavirus and the isolation paradox

Coronavirus and the isolation paradox

Abdullah Shihipar writes: In December, a woman in Tulsa, Okla., used a Craigslist post to plea for holiday companionship. “Anybody need a grandma for Christmas?” she wrote. “I’ll even bring food and gifts for the kids! I have nobody and it really hurts.” More than three in five working Americans report feeling lonely. Now that the country is facing a disease outbreak that demands measures like “social distancing,” working from home and quarantines, that epidemic of loneliness could get even…

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How pluralistic ignorance affects voting choices

How pluralistic ignorance affects voting choices

Erika Weisz writes: Not too long ago, I briefly met Elizabeth Warren in a restaurant in Cambridge, near Harvard, where I’m now a postdoc in psychology. My dad and I saw the Massachusetts senator, a 2020 presidential candidate, walking in as we were walking out. “Give ’em hell,” my dad told the senator, harkening back to Harry Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign. She laughed. “That’s what I do!” Last summer, in a New York Times article about Warren, a voter stated,…

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The biology of love

The biology of love

Ruth Feldman writes: After decades following thousands of mother-infant dyads, hundreds from birth to young adulthood, my lab has mapped the ‘neurobiology of affiliation’ – the emerging scientific field that describes the neural, endocrine and behavioural systems sustaining our capacity to love. The foci of our research – the oxytocin system (based on the neurohormone of bonding); the affiliative, or social, brain; and biological synchrony between mother and child – are all marked by great plasticity, and sculpted throughout animal…

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Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

Humans are hardwired to dismiss facts that don’t fit their worldview

What’s behind this natural tendency? Zhou Eka/Shutterstock.com By Adrian Bardon, Wake Forest University Something is rotten in the state of American political life. The U.S. (among other nations) is increasingly characterized by highly polarized, informationally insulated ideological communities occupying their own factual universes. Within the conservative political blogosphere, global warming is either a hoax or so uncertain as to be unworthy of response. Within other geographic or online communities, vaccines, fluoridated water and genetically modified foods are known to be…

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